Euripides - Euripides Nine Plays [Franklin Library] - 1976

Euripides – Nine Plays – The Franklin Library – 1976

Limited Edition, The 100 Greatest Books of All Time

Euripides (c. 480–406 BC) was the youngest of the three great Athenian tragedians, alongside Aeschylus and Sophocles, and the most modern in temperament. Of the some ninety plays attributed to him in antiquity, nineteen survive — more than from either of his predecessors — a reflection of the lasting hold his work had on later readers. His drama is marked by psychological realism, a sceptical attitude toward inherited myth and divine authority, and an unusual sympathy for women, slaves, and the defeated. Often controversial in his own time, he was in the centuries that followed the most widely read and imitated of the Greek dramatists, and his influence on European theatre, from Seneca to Racine to the modern stage, has been continuous.

This volume brings together nine of his most important surviving plays in a single book: Medea, The Trojan Women, Orestes, Electra, Iphigenia in Tauris, The Bacchae, Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Heracles. Together they span the great themes of his theatre — the violence of the wronged woman, the ruin of the conquered, the terror of inherited guilt, and the unsettling power of Dionysus over reason. The texts are drawn from the Complete Greek Tragedies series edited by Richmond Lattimore and David Grene for the University of Chicago Press, with translations by Rex Warner, Richmond Lattimore, William Arrowsmith, Emily Townsend Vermeule, Witter Bynner, Ronald Frederick Willetts, David Grene, and others — a body of work long regarded as the standard English rendering of Greek tragedy.

The illustrations were created by Quentin Fiore, the American graphic designer best known for his collaborations with Marshall McLuhan on The Medium Is the Massage and War and Peace in the Global Village. Each play opens with a full-page line drawing in his distinctive linear style, evoking the figures and motifs of classical Greek vase painting.

- Full genuine leather binding in dark forest green
- Front and back covers with double gilt borders, Greek key and chain motifs, and a central gilt medallion of a classical head
- Spine with raised bands, gilt rules, Greek key and rosette panels, and gilt title lettering
- Franklin Library imprint stamped in gilt at the foot of the spine
- All edges gilt
- Dark blue silk ribbon marker
- Marbled endpapers
- Moiré silk-effect endsheets
- Printed and bound in the United States of America

Condition is Fine. A well-preserved collector's copy.

Ships from Germany. Carefully packed in cardboard book mailer with protective wrapping.